What if you had a recommendation engine for your data?
Data inventory was automated. A searchable catalog revealed proper data usage.
And the system proactively made smart recommendations inline, as you wrote queries.

Alation makes all of this possible with the world’s first collaborative data catalog for the enterprise. It's a powerful solution that dramatically improves analytic productivity and empowers better business decisions for all.

A Data Catalog Is Only As Good as Its Applications

We took inspiration from Google for a simple interface to connect the language of your business to the technical schema of your data. Finding the data you need is no longer stalled by tricky semantic translations.

Increase productivity for both the SQL-savvy and the novice

Compose

Interested in using a data set for analysis, but not sure which filters or joins to use? We'll guide you through building a query with inline recommendations powered by the Alation Data Catalog.

Best practices shared through endorsements & warnings

Curate

In the creative flow of analysis, it's easy to forget governance policies and best practices. Alation ensures that both data policies and proactive recommendations are available in real-time, as you work.

Share work seamlessly in a wiki built for data analysis

Collaborate

Collaborating with data is challenging. Data updates automatically and conclusions change. Cut and paste mistakes result in errors. Alation removes these barriers to teamwork with data-aware collaboration tools.

Have One Trustworthy Source of Data

What schema is this in?
What columns are available?

Automated Data Catalog

Alation indexes all of your data for business use. Technical metadata is surfaced where it is most relevant to the data consumer - in-context with data definitions and sample data. And machine learned patterns of usage are surfaced alongside the technical details, all to create complete context for the user.

Behavior-based Insights

Alation ingests and parses every query log in your analytic ecosystem to understand how your analysts are using data on the front lines. This information is aggregated and surfaced to users to jump-start their own data literacy.

Where did this come from?
What feeds off it?

Data Lineage

Data is often only as good as it's origins. Alation gives users full insight into the systems that the data hopped through before it hit your report or dashboard, what transformations were made at
each stage, and what other reports or
dashboards are consumers of the same data. This information is all available from a highly interactive data lineage browser built into the data catalog.

Who recommends that I use this?

Social Curation

Data is proliferating but so are self-service opportunities to transform data. Alation communicates clearly to users the internal experts that stand behind every data set. Endorsements, warnings and deprications are clearly marked and communicated. The pace of business today demands that analysis is not slowed down by data curation, but that the intricacies of data governance are made clear to all consumers.

See your data

Alation is a complete repository for all the data assets & data knowledge in your organization. Alation is a single point of reference for your:

How Alation Creates a Data Catalog

Automating the Metadata Inventory

Traditionally creating an inventory of all the data knowledge in the organization has required a time-intensive & people-heavy approach. Alation uses search techniques perfected in the consumer space to simplify & automate creating an inventory of your data assets.

Leveraging User Behavior as Suggestions

Anyone who has participated in a knowledge management project knows how fundamentally unscalable the approach is — no one likes to write documentation.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you could only train all of your analysts to work like that one wonderful data scientist on the team? She just seems to know naturally how to ask the right questions and access the best data.

Alation taps into the trail left by your best analysts, their SQL log files. By parsing the SQL used to access data during the normal flow of their work, Alation’s algorithms can identify meaningful patterns.

More importantly, these patterns can be used as a foundation for automated interventions during any analyst’s workflow. SmartSuggestions in Alation Compose show how recommendations for best practices or policy compliance can be driven intelligently.

Behavior I/O

Data scientists are familiar with the concept of a supervised learning system. Algorithms get better as they receive more feedback. As people confirm good matches, they’re also teaching the machine what a good match is. The machine subsequently gets better and better at suggesting matches. The humans train the machines. You can think of this virtuous cycle as “Behavior I/O”

Documentation through Engagement

As self-service data visualization tools have taken off, more business users across organizations are discovering and transforming their own data to help make critical business decisions. Sharing the nuances and best practices of how to use data becomes ever more critical in this environment.

With data curation, any analyst in the organization can be a curator of data knowledge, and subject matter experts are encouraged to do so. By upvoting or downvoting data assets, annotating the why of where a filter was last used, or adding additional nuance to a data definition, any analyst can curate data for the organization.

Data curation is a new approach that gets organizations to where data documentation efforts alone could not. Data curation promotes reuse of the data knowledge that already exists & results in higher analyst productivity. Collaboration comes more naturally. And the coverage and accuracy of data knowledge in the organization also increases.

Using APIs for Virtual Data Pipelines

Alation can stand-alone or be a significant component in your footprint for managing data in your organization. Designed for the data consumer, it also supports the data creator in the role of a single point of reference for enterprise data.

Alation uses API access to read technical metadata and business definitions from existing third party repositories.

Just as easily, third party tools can access Alation as a point of reference in their work managing data throughout the enterprise. This is done through a standard set of APIs.

Alation APIs Feed These Tools

Integration

Data preparation

Audit

BI semantic layers
and more…

Data Platforms That Alation Connects To

Alation Links Data to Business Value

Work Better Together

Everyone in the organization, from data novices to experts, can easily search, collaborate and leverage knowledge from one trustworthy source.

Index All Data Knowledge

Automatically collect all knowledge about data and its usage so useful information is always available to all in your organization.

Use Data with Confidence

Share insights that are always relevant, up-to-date, accurate and easy-to-reference across the entire organization.

Improve Productivity

Reduce the time needed to onboard employees, document data and write complex SQL queries with one easy-to-use interface.